It’s early research yet, but a new robotics project on display at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) has the makings of a revolution.

Robots are getting more and more versatile while all on their lonesome, acquiring abilities from a sand-flea’s jump to a shark’s stroke through water to cheetah’s running gate. Working together to use those specializations to greater effect, though, has always been much trickier. Now, a German and American research team is demonstrating a networked movement system that uses tiny scout robots to run ahead and support a larger unit.

The goal of this particular project is to use the scouts to watch for slippery terrain that could trip up a clumsy quadruped, but it doesn’t take much imagination to come up with larger-scale applications than slip-checks. Soldiers facing IEDs and other hidden dangers could use this sort of organized movement to maintain a perimeter of fleet-footed scout robots around a humvee advancing slowly through city streets. That perimeter could provide feedback to a human driver or, more likely, interface with a self-driving program. Remember, the US military need not abide by civilian regulations on self-driving cars — especially when in-country.

Besides size, this demonstration also varies the value of the robots. This means that not only are the scouts capable of more than the robot they’re escorting, they can be used in much more dangerous ways. Disposable-enough robots could be used like canaries in various IED coal mines, speeding up the often tortuously slow process of exploding or disarming a bomb. And since smaller means stronger (relatively speaking), small scout-bots could survive far more trauma.

The control and networking used here is very simple, based mostly on watching an optical tag on the scout’s back. However, the digital signal could be sent just as effectively with more robust wireless technology — and indeed would probably have to be to scale up to a large number of independent scouts. This would drive up costs, but the military is nothing if not willing to spend.

It’s a lot easier to get airborne drones to move as one.

The two robots actually used in this experiment were the snappily-named StarlETH quadruped and VelociRoACH roach-bot. StarlETH is a fairly standard BigDog-alike, and as such it has problems with certain terrain types. VelociRoACH, on the other hand, is a Berkley-developed speedster that can reach up to 6 miles per hour, or 26 body-lengths per second. Two such different species of robot could compliment each other well — but of course that’s just the beginning. DARPA has already said it’s working on robot swarm technology, and they’ll be working airborne drones into the equation as well.

Before you go, check out this blooper vid in which the big walker accidentally pancaked its little buddy.